Bonnie is the Creative Director for Great Escape Publishing, a regular contributor to The Right Way to Travel, and creator of the Breakfast Stock Club, which helps folks to get up-and-running selling their photos in online stock photo agencies. She got her first travel articles and photos published after attending the Ultimate Travel Writer's Workshop six summers ago in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Before joining Great Escape Publishing, she taught English in the South of France and vagabonded through South America and South East Asia, dutifully testing all of the local foods and massage techniques.
Favorite travel tip:
Don't book a hotel room when you can rent an apartment! It tends to be cheaper, offers more room, and lets you live like a local, with a kitchen and living area. Recently, some friends and I found a cute apartment right in the middle of Paris with a balcony for half the price we would have paid for a hotel room in the city. I like to use Airbnb.com or Vrbo.com to book.
We’ve had a flurry of newcomers to the Breakfast Stock Club recently – welcome! Whether you’ve been with us for a while, or you’re brand-spankin’-new, you know that stock photography is all about selling photos. But you’ll never sell a thing if you never actually start. So here’s a little refresher to get you excited […]
Stock photography is a numbers game. The more photos you have in your portfolio, the more potential income you can make. If you only have 20 images on a site, the odds of selling much are low. They say you really start to see sales once you hit the 300 mark. And while that might […]
I’ve been inspired lately by the book: “Younger Next Year,” by a doctor who specializes in health and aging… and his “guinea pig” patient. The basic premise is that 70% of aging is a choice. And staying young all comes down to staying active. The two authors explain how to “hack” your body and brain […]
Happy summer, and welcome to the half-way point of 2017! It’s the perfect time to look back at our goals, decide if they’re still what we want, and refocus. In January, I made some vague stock photo goals for 2017: Build a stock portfolio on Alamy Get published in a few travel magazines What I’ve […]
One of the best parts about stock photography is that you can photograph whatever you want—there’s no one telling you what you have to shoot. And while it’s great to have that kind of creative freedom, sometimes it can be tough to know where to start. Rather than randomly photographing things, savvy stock photographers keep […]
I love taking headshots, because I think people are fascinating and beautiful. Everyone is beautiful in the right light. But when a client pays you hundreds of dollars for a shot, they want to see an image of their best self – without any blemishes, wrinkles, yellow teeth or stray hairs getting in the way. […]
Who will buy this photo? No one, that’s who! It’s rare to see the Peruvian Andes (where I took this) on such a clear day… but the photo itself is dark, gray, dull, and boring. But how about this one: This is the exact same photo after a few minutes of processing in Lightroom – […]
If there’s one deal breaker in stock photography, here it is: missing focus. Submitting a photo to your stock agency that isn’t sharp is a sure way to get your image rejected. Luckily, there’s an easy way to avoid this – zoom in to 100% to check. When you view a small version of your […]
Check out these two photos: Although these shots were taken in the same tulip field, they are very different images. This is the power of changing your lens. The photo on the left was taken with a wide angle lens and the photo on the right was taken with a telephoto. While wide angle lenses […]
Last month I told you that I recently became a contributor at Alamy. You can catch up on the details of Alamy in that issue, here. Although I’m still working on building up my portfolio there, your fellow reader, Colleen Bessel, is much further along in the process. Colleen has been plugging away at Alamy […]